Meta

Category / Internet

Since the advent of the World Wide Web, businesses have tapped into it for various reasons, including marketing, sales, customer service, and beyond. There’s another area, however, that may not have improved its user experience as technology has made it easier, and that’s job posting and applicant tracking.

From early pioneers like CareerBuilder (née Netstart) to Hotjobs, Monster, and other 90s upstarts, we’ve now reached a point of having fairly sophisticated services that businesses and job posters alike are using every single day. There are platforms that singlehandedly remove the need for paper applications to be entered by an in-house staffer, provide online listings, and deliver digitally screened “results” to hiring managers and HR teams. There are third-party services that reach people where they already are, such as LinkedIn’s Jobs area, which offers an opportunity to collect “easy” applications where a user simply uploads a resume and shares his or her LinkedIn profile, or sends users to a company recruiting website, directly to the job that’s being reviewed. Some services are premium, others specialize in particular industries, such as Poached in the hospitality space, or Dice in the technology arena.

Seems great, right? Well, it’s not at all perfect.

For one thing, both job seekers and job posters aren’t managing the expectations of the other party. It’s become extremely easy to fire off a dozen applications and ignore even simple adjustments to a resume that might bust through the clutter for job hunters. Lots of hiring managers are leaving job hunters almost completely in the dark after an application is submitted. Again, not ALL hiring managers, but many are. I took an informal survey via Twitter, and the results were actually more grim than I expected.

If you've applied to jobs using online forms in the last 12-18 months, what percentage of employers responded to you AT ALL?

In it, a whopping 75% of respondents said they received ANY sort of response (interview opportunity, follow-up for more information, decline) less than one-quarter of the time. Another 19% said they heard something back 26-50% of the time. All told, 94% say they hear back from a hiring company less than half of the time they post for jobs.

So with all that data, all that sophistication, one of the most simple things that could have been done – clicking a button to send declines to anyone who didn’t get selected for an interview, isn’t being done MOST of the time. If you spend less than five minutes searching online, you’ll see myriad complaints about this very topic. When I posted about this on Facebook, a few people commented or messaged me privately to say they’d actually really like to know they weren’t being considered, rather than be left in the dark. It’s a sentiment I agree with, and it only increases as you post for positions. On a personal note, I’ve applied for 150 jobs since the beginning of October. Some have gone through emails to hiring managers, others have been personal references, and I fall in that 0-25% bucket.

At first, I thought it was just me. As someone who’s hunted for jobs a few times in the last 20 years, I’ve learned a lot about having multiple versions of your resume, not simply copy-and-pasting your cover letters, and so forth. I’ve asked hiring managers for feedback on my resume or received unrequested feedback about it, which has been extremely helpful. It’s not just me.

After having spoken with a few friends that were hunting for jobs in three U.S. cities in the last 12-18 months, I figured it was worth asking those on the other side of the equation about online job posting platforms, and how they screened candidates. One is an in-house recruiter and the other works at a talent agency.

The in-house recruiter let me know that while his company’s online system did review and screen resumes, his team did actually review each and every resume that crossed their desk. Additionally, his company had created a color-coded system to flag positions, which individual departments were able to “set” based on a variety of factors. Still, the team reviewed the resumes that were funneled to them by the online system. His company does send out notices to those who don’t make it into the interview rounds.

The recruiter at the talent firm stated that he didn’t think a lot of the systems were as helpful for his purposes and found that people “just apply to any role they can if a company is of interest to them.” He also stated that keywords are definitely important when attempting to filter resumes and that while some Applicant Tracking Services had algorithms to attempt to show the most qualified candidates, it’s not a perfect science.

Beyond these details, he also shared that many recruiters would probably welcome a warm greeting or an emailed introduction rather than simply having candidates go through a system and send a cover letter. He recommends tracking down a hiring manager’s name or asking friends who work at an organization to help make an introduction, rather than simply submitting your application blindly.

For me, the challenge is that some of these application services take a fair amount of time to fill out, and it’s extremely frustrating to literally hear nothing after sending one along. While many services will parse an uploaded resume, no software is perfect, and you still need to review each of your positions for upload errors, including punctuation or spacing. It’s not always as “easy” as simply pasting your resume into a field and moving on. I’d rather get the decline and grasp that perhaps someone was on the other end.

This is clearly a frustration by users, and based on a few anecdotes, it doesn’t seem like hiring managers are all completely enamored by these services, either. At this point, it seems that taking the extra step of tracking down a hiring manager and reaching out directly is absolutely recommended. While not always a simple task, perhaps that’s the “clutter buster” that is required in today’s competitive environment where the ease of access to dozens and dozens (and dozens) of jobs makes it easy for individuals to apply at will.

My hope is that in the future, job searchers do a little less “willy nilly” posting for things that are creating clutter on the other end, and that those hiring for jobs can leverage the great technologies they have at their fingertips to keep applicants in the loop, without making it a burden on their own jobs.

Thought you were the l33t h4x0r? Think again, because try2hack is up and ready for your amusement. Okay, it’s probably not the hardest thing around, but it provides some amusement for those of you who have grown out of just being a script kiddie. w00t!

Looks like Verisign really doesn’t care that ICANN came out against their SiteFinder b-s, nor do they seem to care that there are other companies out there who aren’t using some sort of monopoly power to redirect all traffic to their site. There’s a big difference between registering all the names yourself and redirecting to your site and just doing so because you can. Apparently, V/S doesn’t care and doesn’t seem to be budging on the subject. If you’re interested in topics like this, apparently there’s a service called ICANNWatch which is a blog type deal where you can read up on this stuff.

Verisign is going to get the big smackdown on this, I have a feeling. They keep quoting chapter and verse about how they’re basically masters of the universe, but even Al Gore didn’t go this far. And he INVENTED the Internet, don’tcha know.

Well then you need to read this article and the attached threads from Slashdot regarding Microsoft updating your Windows software with their “Rights Management Services”, or RMS. This post by racermd at Slashdot has a good sum-up. If you want to do something smart at this point, I would suggest not taking this “patch” that MS is offering.

Also – could this be the first step in alternative OS use by current Windows users? The post makes a couple good statements of fact in that direction. I think this might be a turning point in the OS “race” or whatever you want to call it at this point.

CNET’s News.com is reporting that some broadband providers are beginning to put some sort of cap on how much bandwidth a user can crank through in a given month. The article specifically talks about a Comcast example, and goes into what some other providers are thinking about doing. This is obviously getting a big push with the peer-to-peer issue currently going on, as traffic has probably lowered a bit, but is still high. The statistic that is amazing is that 6 percent of Comcast’s users use up 78% of Comcast’s bandwidth, or so they are reporting. Forget 80/20 rule, that’s way out of line. I did like the attitudes of some of the people involved, such as SBC, who says that they “make whatever bandwidth they need (their customers) available to them.”

Looks like a Senior Special Agent at the Treasury Department has laid a bit of smackdown of his own on Verisign, which has been trashed across the Internet for the last week by users and pundits alike. You can check out the writeup and direct link to the article here at boingboing.

I’m glad someone who’s in the gov’t has finally made a statement about this – and what better way to do it than to praise the folks that created the fix for the webjacking that Verisign just pulled.

I’ve passed through waxy.org before, but haven’t really stuck with it for some reason. After seeing the last upcoming.org project they put together, I decided to read further, and found this great post about what ended up being, unfortunately, the first computer virus. WAYYYY back when UNIVAC was the machine to have (and no, most didn’t have one for obvious reasons), when John Walker was trying to come up with a new way to move game files around from machine to machine. Oops. An interesting history lesson for a Sunday, even if waxy.org did post it over a month and a half ago =)

Looks like “Methlabs” has set up some software that effectively blocks all known RIAA IP ranges from your computer. The technology is called “PeerGuardian”, and apparently lags your computer bigtime… So if you’re into that sort of thing, check it out – I just heard about it moments ago.

[update 2] David Teather of The Guardian has dropped his recap on the recent “crackdown” that the RIAA has put forth on music downloaders. It’s interesting to see this quite late, considering the hubbub in the USA last week about all this.

Wanted to know what was going on where you are or where you’re going, and didn’t feel like looking at every local newspaper? Well perhaps upcoming.org is your ultimate solution. Just kicked in not too long ago, and has a pretty good layout and easy-to-get-on interface. Check it out – the more, the merrier, of course. [link via MetaFilter]

It seems that Verisign (our friends at Network Solutions, of course) has made it so any mistyped domain name that doesn’t go to someone scamming on another domain, will now go to their own “404” page. dejah420’s post over at MetaFilter makes the point that they’re now the largest cybersquatter. I’d have to say I agree. I don’t see how they can really do this and not have it be an issue. Pretty shady stuff, if you ask me. It’s almost as bad as people who hijack real URLs and make them go to spam or pr0n sites. leuschke.org tracks back and offers links at ICANN which you can contact with complaints and comments. Screw them. This is ridiculous. Next thing we’ll be hearing is that someone has the rights to one-click ordering. Oh, wait – that already happened.